Thursday, 28 August 2014

We’ve seen that there
are essentially two types of Master: the natural Master, who comes by his body
by the normal process of regeneration, and the unnatural Master, either
disembodied or forced to steal an existence in order to survive. The first
tends to play the role for character, the second, mostly for plot.

There’s also a loose
correlation between the ‘type’ of Master and the success with which he has been
historically played, and also with his ‘fit’ to a particular Doctor.

Roger Delgado, despite
being in real life a very pleasant and amiable man, could have been born to
play the dead-eyed gentleman psychopath of the universe, and he rarely, if
ever, looked forced on-screen. He was chosen specifically to be the
Anti-Pertwee.

The two ‘crispy critter’
Masters – Peter Pratt and Geoffrey Beevers – were not chosen specifically to
play the Anti-Baker, and such was their emaciation they were forced to play the
role largely on plot, to find their way back to a body. Anthony Ainley’s Master
was not Doctor-specific either, and having stolen his body, he was forced from
the beginning to be a Masteralike of Delgado’s version; it was more important
that he looked like what had come before than it was to let him be his own
villain. While little is ever heard from the CGI-snake Master, Eric Roberts
(bless him, what did he think he was doing up there?) played the Master, again
having stolen a body in his outing, purely driven by the plot to get more
bodies, rather than as any kind of appropriate Anti-McGann.

When the series became a
hit again in 2005, it was more or less certain that the Doctor would face off
with his ultimate adversary again. But which Master would it be? Another
re-tread of the Delgado Imprimatur, all beard and convoluted plans and
gloating? Or someone new and naturalistic, someone that would be genuinely
fearsome and scary and funny and dark and aimed squarely at providing the
antithesis of whichever Doctor he encountered?

Sir Derek Jacobi works
beautifully as a bluff, delivering the delicious oddity of his
Hartnell-inspired Professor Yana, a man the Doctor perversely admires, and a
great insight into what the Master could be if ever he underwent a
‘reverse-Valeyarding’ and had an incarnation that was dedicated to peace and
scientific progress. We think only briefly of the meaning of it all when he
gets headaches and a drumming in his head – the noise that drives the Master
mad had never been mentioned before, which meant we didn’t know to look for it.
When the fob watch is revealed though, the tension and the excitement ramp up,
goaded and whipped on by the incidental music. It could be anyone, any Time
Lord, hiding out at the end of the universe from the terror of the Time War,
but we know, we just know who it is, who it absolutely has to be. The first
time you ever see this scene, it’s one that gets you off your seat, and when
the kindly Yana looks into the watch, it’s a harrowing scene – we have already
been primed in The Family of Blood to think of the Time Lord ‘disguise’ as a
real person – as John Smith in the Doctor’s case, a real, decent human being,
denied his existence and validity by the necessity of a Time Lord reclaiming
his life. And here it is again, the same sensation of watching a good man die,
right in front of us, the new Master’s first victim.

When Jacobi becomes the
Master proper, it’s oddly wrong, oddly ill-fitting – when Ainley pulled the
same trick in The Keeper of Traken, he went on immediately to inhabit his new
body with a degree of gleeful hopping about Logopolis, killing for fun. With
Jacobi, it’s all in the eyes, and there is a seething hatred and resentment
there that harks back to the Peter Pratt Master. It’s delicious to speculate
what would have happened had the Jacobi Master continued, escaped to do battle
with the Tenth Doctor (as we learn he was found abandoned as a child, this must
surely be a new incarnation of the Master who electrocutes Chantho – would he
have gone on to become the Anti-Tennant, we wonder). But of course he doesn’t –
being ‘killed by an insect’ as he puts it, and determining, almost deliberately
it seems, to mirror the Doctor in his youth and strength, and regenerating
on-screen and in the Tardis, turning, screaming, into John Simm.

The Simm Master explodes
on screen and begins immediately matching David Tennant’s Doctor, trait for
trait. It’s all there in his first five minutes – there’s the post-regenerative
chattiness, there’s the techno-skill, flying the Tardis with gusto, there’s the
glint of mad humour and the smile. And there – right there at the end of Utopia
– is something new and modern. When the Doctor says “I’m sorry”, Simm’s
spitting of “Tough!” is visceral and dangerous; it’s a boot to the Doctor’s
face, and a note of the savagery behind Delgado’s suavity, Ainley’s chuckle and
Roberts’s…whatever-that-was.

Simm goes on to imitate
Delgado not in any of the trappings of his Master (though the red-lined jacket
is a nice touch), but in the fundamental philosophy of what a ‘natural’ Master
is. This time, he is absolutely the Anti-Tennant, and the terrifying thing
about the script of The Sound of Drums and The Last of the Time Lords is that
it’s the ultimate version of the Pertwee scripts – disguise, hypnosis, cunning
plans and world domination – but given a brave new twist. Simm’s is the Master
who won. This is a devastating proposition, because the Master is no ordinary
villain – he’s the philosophical opposite of everything the Doctor stands for,
embodied in an equal, who can argue his corner and make the viewer question the
Doctor’s position. It’s the combination of the scale of what the Master does to
the Earth once he’s won it – “the only person to get out of Japan alive…”, and
the unbridled glee with which Simm delivers his ‘stark raving bonkers’ Master,
complete with dancing, disco and decimation, that makes his Master something
fresh and vibrant in those two episodes.

And then of course, the
production team, having well and truly had its cake with a fantastic, energised
Anti-Tennant Master, decides to eat it too, and give us Simm as the
body-snatching Master, the ‘other’ Master. And like disembodied Masters before
him, Simm has no option but to play the character subsumed by plot, this time
knowing his body is ‘born to die’ but multiplying almost endlessly and aiming
to stop the drumming in his head. The End of Time is a busy script, but Simm
manages to deliver the furious need of a disembodied Master more effectively in
the burger-chomping scene than either Pratt or Beevers were allowed, because he
keeps (largely) his own face and delivers the performance through his own
interpretation of the Master as a creature propped up and kept sane by nothing
more than ravenous consumption.

Again, the Master is
victorious in this story, though it feels (like the character himself) more
hollow and reversible this time, less powerful and meaningful, and when events
spin out of his control, the Master falls back on another old trope – the idea
of joining forces with the Doctor to confront the greater threat.

What is
unique in the Master’s long on-screen history though is what Simm does in his
final moments – he makes us sympathise with the Master, driven mad by
‘grown-ups’ who abused his mind if not his body; he is the child who never
stood a chance, and grew up determined to be noticed. Simm’s exit might be a
cliché, but it’s arguably the best and most worthwhile cliché in fifty years of
Doctor Who.

The Master will of
course be back, despite Steven Moffat’s protestations otherwise in recent months.
Maybe not today; maybe not tomorrow, but soon. And when he comes back, he will
have a lot of history to live up to – much of it very recent. The ghost of John
Simm’s Master will not be easy to erase. But that of course is what rebirth is
all about.